If you were forced to guess the one political issue that will decide the 2024 U.S. election based on sheer volume of news coverage, you might pick inflation or immigration. Maybe plagiarism. Or Taylor Swift’s Kansas City Chiefs fandom — almost anything, in fact, besides climate change.
And yet a recent study suggests anxiety about global warming might be what kept Donald Trump from a second term in the White House in 2020, and it could deny him again this year. As far-fetched as that sounds, it’s a reminder, at least, that support for the climate fight runs deeper in this country than many — especially Republican leaders — might think.
It is true that roughly two-thirds of Americans worry about and want solutions to an increasingly chaotic climate. But those same Americans consistently rank that issue well below the economy, health care, crime and about a dozen other anxieties. Just 2% of respondents in a recent Gallup poll considered climate change the biggest issue facing the US.
But a new analysis of polling data by the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Center for Social and Environmental Futures (C-SEF) suggests the climate issue gave Democrats a 3% edge in the popular vote in 2020, more than enough to swing the election to President Joe Biden.
The researchers admit they’re “cautious and circumspect” about that specific number, which they call “unavoidably speculative.” But evidence for some kind of political edge is compelling.